We Applaud Women In Tech. Where Are The Girls In Tech Though?

Indian girls tend to lose interest in tech subjects around the age of 10, as this writer proves. How, then, are we going to have women in tech in the future?

It is heartening to hear a whole lot of dialogue and conversation happening around how to get more women in tech and how to help them succeed in tech careers and so on. Pardon me everyone, but I don’t know when it all started being just noise and not meaningful conversation. I am going to be blunt in saying that, to me it has become a white noise now. And I have good reasons to show for it.

Logic tells me that to have more and more women in tech tomorrow, there should be a greater number of girls in tech today. They need to be immersed in technology, science, math, engineering. They need to love those subjects passionately and that is just one part of the tech career story. They also need to make supporting choices in education and the job market to emerge as technocrats, tech-entrepreneurs and tech-leaders. Are they doing it?

The first was an in-school program – mandatory for all students. In most school classrooms, there was an equal proportion of boys and girls. All of them enjoyed the experiments and model making activities equally. We never noticed any trend of either boys or girls being better or faster in applying STEM concepts in building working models or coming up with inventive ideas. That was a good reassurance that innately girls are as well-equipped as boys to handle tech/ STEM subjects. And this was across grades 1 to 9.

We also ran highly popular Summer Camps in one of the most entrepreneurial and techie neighborhood in probably the whole of India. Now the Summer Camp enrollment was not a mandate by school, it was obviously based on the child’s interest. We had between 300-500 children in the age group of 6 to 15 years attending our Summer Camp every year. Children could choose from an array of about 8-10 different courses and the most sought after courses were ‘Junior Engineer’ (for ages 7-10) and ‘Senior Engineer’ (for ages 10-15).

Year after year, I noticed the same trend. In ‘Junior Engineer’ batches, boys and girls were close to 50-50%. In ‘Senior Engineer’ batches, guess… the percentage of girls dropped to less than 10%!

What is it that makes a 9-year old girl suddenly lose interest in Engineering courses once she turns 10? There were no girls in most of our Robotics batches for 10+ age-group. With great difficulty I got some girls to attend our 3-D Printing course and courses on Product Design when we launched them first. It was equally difficult to get girls into our Senior Programming and App Development courses, although Junior Coding courses for 7-10 age-group had 50% girl population. And remember – by virtue of our centre’s location, we catered to the population comprising predominantly of the best techies and start-up entrepreneurs of India. So there was no reason to believe that such parents would discourage their daughters from enrolling into engineering courses.

So what is stopping our girls from diving into technology and engineering with passion? As mentioned above, it is not for lack of aptitude or of parental encouragement (at least in the environment I mention). Year after year I spoke to hundreds of parents to understand what was happening. Our Kitchen Science courses that involved hands-on cooking were overrun with boys – thanks to Masterchef TV show! But girls were hesitating to pick up screw-drivers and soldering guns and even an App Inventor tutorial after the age of 10-12. They were losing out on the practical skills that could be gained via tinkering, deconstructing gadgets, coding though the night – all pursuits that make a future garage entrepreneur!

On the other hand, the trainers in our classrooms were predominantly women. I always hoped that having a women engineer teach and build STEM-based projects would inspire the girls to wield tools without hesitation. I hope it did have some effect. But what I also noticed was that every time we were on a recruitment drive, we would get tons of applications from women engineers – Electronics, Computer Science, Chemical, Telecommunications – and they were ready to teach 1st grade General Science!

These were young graduates and I couldn’t help asking them why they didn’t want to practice what they learnt in 4 years of engineering. They always said that the industry jobs were too hectic and stressful and they were happier doing school teaching. Why did they even do engineering then in the first place?

Two common reasons emerged – it was just a default choice because which other degree was respectful enough? And secondly, their parents thought match-making with a good ‘well-settled’ engineer groom would be easier if their daughter was an engineer too! This is the harsh reality behind why you have so many girls in engineering colleges and so few in tech company corner offices!

From many conversations I had with girls’ parents – who were at times equally hapless that their daughter who used to be so interested in electronics earlier is now refusing to look at it – I could see the following trends emerge :

Are there other girls? : Rare girls wanting to enroll into engineering courses always inquired if there were other girls in the batch. If not, they would cancel too. I could never figure out how to stop this chicken-egg situation!

She’d rather do dance/music/art this Summer : Girls on the threshold of teen-age felt this sudden urge to indulge in more ‘perceived girly’ pursuits. It baffled their parents too.

There are meticulous research-based reports that corroborate my experience. The situation is no different in the best of the universities or economies of the world. There just isn’t enough gender diversity in STEM studies and careers. A study across nations on women in engineering says that Indian women, once in college do complete engineering education in proportions better than that in the US and the report attributes this to the lack of hostile/chilly environment towards women in Indian engineering colleges. However it goes on to say that pre-college barriers are more significant for women in India.

I do not know what to do about this. I know for sure that this is real – most girls mentally retire from tech aspirations at the age of 10! In most cases after that, it is not intense passion for tech, but merely a desire to take a socially acceptable route that takes them into tech careers and no wonder then that they are ready to drop it at any sign of discomfort (exceptional outliers exist too).

The so-called ‘leaky pipeline’ of women in STEM starts not when they become mothers as the popular perception is, but much earlier – on the verge of their adolescence! Is our popular culture to blame for this? Is it our parenting? Is there something about the workplaces and work culture that needs to change? Are our books, media, stories, role models not conveying the right message? How will we have more women in tech tomorrow if there are no girls in tech today?

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This is a fascinating read for me Vrunda from a purely Sociological perspective. You seem to have very consciously engineered the program to eliminate all the usual suspects that might have resulted in your analysis/research being inconclusive. Of all the very interesting and eye-opening details you have presented, two that grab my attention are-1. Kitchen science class was over run with boys 2. Girls mentally retire from tech classes even though they were being encouraged by parents and had “role model” women teachers, (so thoughtfully and strategically planned by you) to emulate. I have taught the Arts subject Sociology at under graduate and post graduate levels and I have my own deductions. On the one hand, like you rightly point out – the “pop” perception of certain courses or fields is a big draw for kids in school. That will swing their own decision making regardless of their gender. So that would explain why boys chose kitchen science class. This would be the case with singing, dancing etc too if they were taught as subjects. But as a fall out of a patriarchy boys will get to pursue what’s perceived as “popular” or “lucrative” primarily because they consciously or unconsciously get the first preference of available choices, in a patriarchal society. For eg. Sports was something earlier encouraged (mostly by parents) for boys to pursue as soon as it became “popular” and now after many years of “lag” its something girls may actively pursue too. Secondly regardless of our modernity- women’s broad roles are still broadly decided by family and society not by themselves. This too is a fall out of our Indian patriarchy. This means that ultimately a parent sees a boy as an investment for their own future so they guide and direct their sons lives to be successful and lucrative but a girl is viewed as ultimately leaving the parental home so there’s only a half hearted approach to guidance and direction. Lot more effort goes into grooming them to be pliant and compliant wives and daughters in law and this starts consciously and unconsciously when they are very very young! Thirdly I do think there is an innate lack of interest and capability for tech for some people as it is towards other specific streams. However is it that since tech is clearly lucratively rewarding, we women want that so much just to be able to be on equal footing and maybe wrest our place in society? From a feminist perspective there is a valid logic in this of course. However a larger question (from a societal goal perspective) it brings into focus specifically in a capitalist driven economy is -why is tech more lucrative/more desirable than say teaching tech or perhaps being a nurse or growing crops? As Karl Marx often questioned- are workers (and potential workers)increasingly becoming more alienated from their own passions and human essence, increasingly towards mechanistic driven goals that may not always or necessarily lead to self actualisation and self fulfilment?

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